India needs a lot more banks and a lot more large sized ones to meet the growing needs of the country needs in the path of making a smart recovery post pandemic interruption, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Sunday. Speaking at 74th Annual General Meeting of Indian Banks’ Association at Mumbai, Sitharaman said there was an immediate need to scale up banking to meet the growing needs of the industry and also to ensure that all economic centres of the country are covered with at least one physical or digital banking presence. “We need to scale up banking. The need is for at least four-five more SBI sized banks,” she said, while reminding that the union exercise among public sector banks have helped in moving ahead with creation of large banks. Having done two rounds of bank solidify earlier, the Central government in 2019 decided to merge six disparate and weak PSBs into four in one stroke.
